When longtime Lexington resident Karl Weiland was driving to work on Sept. 11, 2001, he heard on the car radio that an airplane crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City.
“I thought, just like people who were being interviewed on the news later that night, that there had been an accident,” he recalled to the Observer.
Weiland, who has lived in Lexington since 1981, was the head of adolescent services at Somerville Mental Health Clinic, where he led the clinic’s trauma response team that addressed teen suicides. There was a teen suicide that day, so Weiland imagined his work day would consist of addressing that tragedy.
As he routinely would, he called one of the trauma centers in Boston to gather information.
“Forget that,” Weiland said his contact told him over the phone. “Drop what you’re doing and get to Logan Airport as soon as possible.”
At that moment, Weiland was still piecing together what was happening. When the second plane hit, it became clear this wasn’t just a tragic accident.
“I had to reorient myself from a so-called small town tregedy of suicide to a bigger deal,” he said.
Weiland remembers his drive to the airport being “eerily quiet,” like the first few days of the COVID-19 lockdown.
“There was virtually no traffic, nothing in the skies, and everything was just quiet,” he said.
Weiland was sent to an event space inside the Hilton Boston Logan Airport. About 100 people — families of the passengers on the flights out of Logan that hit the Twin Towers — were there to get information about their loved ones.
“There were more questions than answers for everyone in the ballroom,” Weiland said. “People were just sitting around saying, ‘can you verify that my relative, my person, was on that flight?’ and nobody had any real information.”
He, alongside about 50 airline workers, mental health professionals, religious leaders, and Red Cross responders, was there to provide emotional support to the families during the traumatic event.
“People wanted information, they didn’t want to grieve, they didn’t want to cry, they wanted information,” he said. “It was the least useful of any response I’ve ever done…we were kind of twiddling our thumbs, trying to figure out what to do and how to be helpful.”
Weiland remembers interacting with one person, in particular, at the Hilton that day — a woman who worked as a ticket agent for one of the airlines that was hijacked.
“She felt so bad that she had sold the tickets to the people who were on the flight,” he recalled. “A lot of the airline people who were trying, on one hand, to be supportive to the families, they were feeling it themselves.”
Weiland also remembers how in the room next to the ballroom he was in, a large television was “frequently replaying images of the planes crashing into the towers.”
“That was the real horror for me,” he said. “I hope none of the family members wandered in there where it was just on repeat.”
After about an hour, FBI agents showed up and took over for Weiland and the other helpers.
“I had this combined feeling of, ‘oh, these poor people, nobody’s going to care how they feel, they’re just going to be investigated, it’s just about information now that the government needs,’” he recalled.
“On the other hand, I felt relieved because I didn’t know what I was doing there. This role of ‘supporter’ was getting increasingly vague, there was a kind of overkill of support that couldn’t really be provided under the circumstances.”
After that, Weiland said, the federal agents sent all the emotional support helpers home. He remembers the roads being, once again, starkly quiet when he pulled his car out of the airport.
Beyond that, he doesn’t remember much.
“I must have gone back to the office,” he guessed. “Ostensibly, I was in charge of things and had to pay attention if something was needed at work, but boy oh boy, that was quite an impressive day in terms of contending with things.”
Weiland will always remember where he was and what he was doing when he heard that the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, though.
“There are those moments when somebody says, ‘where were you when?’ and this is one of those for me, I don’t think I will ever forget that.”
Weiland stuck with his line of work, opening a private therapy practice in Somerville after the clinic where he was working on Sept. 11, 2001 closed. He closed his practice in 2019. In semi-retirement, Weiland helps businesses with grief and trauma response. He contracts with employee assistance programs, and when something tragic happens — like a sudden death in an office, a bank robbery, or workplace violence — Weiland is hired to help employees work through that trauma.
Twenty-five years after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Weiland said the state of the world now does not give him much solace.
“Given the context we’re in today internationally, it doesn’t feel a lot better,” he said.